How Sitecore’s latest products support your digital transformation
One of the greatest bottlenecks to delivering powerful customer experiences is disconnected teams. When it comes to online experiences, the disconnect between Marketing and IT is well known. In one study, 97% of business users recognized that lack of alignment between teams impacts a project. Other research has confirmed the benefits of connecting the two. When marketing departments integrate IT into more nimble teams, their businesses get to market 2x – 4x faster and grow revenue at 2x the average of S&P 500.
Knowing the truth is one thing, but sometimes it takes a crisis to get people to act. Many organizations have known for some time that digital transformation is paramount for their survival. They’re also aware that succeeding in it requires IT and Marketing working together. Despite this awareness, they’ve put both off. Until now, when it needs to have happened — several months ago.
While we don’t, unfortunately, have access to a time machine, we have been thinking about digital transformation for years and building products that empower our customers to take the next step in their journey to a strong digital presence.
And I’m proud to say that in the midst of this transformative time, we have released our most exciting product line yet, giving brands access to the latest innovations, integrated in one place to connect Marketing and IT for digital transformations that deliver value today and establish a foundation for continued growth tomorrow.
Making life easier for IT
Over the last year or so, a common piece of feedback our product teams have heard from developers is that they want container infrastructures, headless development for .NET developers, ASP.NET Core support, and better serialization tooling.
Sitecore® Experience Platform™ (XP) 10’s enhanced developer experience is our response.
The Docker Containers option means teams can now use infrastructure-as-code deployments for simplified installation and deployment, reduced cloud infrastructure costs, hosting flexibility, and simplified management of multiple Sitecore instances.
We have also heard about the importance of flexibility and choice for our users from customers and partners alike. Our new ASP.NET Core SDK expands our headless delivery options and allows teams to build their applications faster on the latest .NET technology. This all translates to quicker deployment for headless and hybrid-headless solutions.
And, yes, Sitecore® Experience Manager™ 10 includes these all as well.
Making life easier for Marketing
In Sitecore XP 9, we introduced a new editing interface: Horizon. In Sitecore XP 10, we’ve made it significantly better. For example, it’s now a lot easier to use our next-generation UI and in-context insights within large multilingual and multisite instances.
We’ve also improved the author and editing experience in two ways. For those who still prefer working in Microsoft Word, we’ve made it simpler to bring that content into Sitecore’s editing interface. For customers leveraging or looking to leverage Sitecore Content Hub to create even more efficiencies throughout the content process, we’ve improved our integration with Sitecore Content Hub's CMP and DAM. Your taxonomy and field types can now be imported directly into Sitecore XP, and you can access your content in Sitecore DAM directly from Horizon.
In continued support of Sitecore’s mission of creating human connections in a digital world, we’ve expanded analytics to provide a more human and actionable view of data. With deeper insight into audience segmentation, marketers can more easily provide the right content for prospects and customers during each moment of their journey.
This covers the biggest benefits of Sitecore XP 10. But before wrapping up, I want to highlight just a couple of the updates we made to Sitecore Content Hub and Sitecore Experience Commerce.
Sitecore Content Hub: Better integrations and AI automation
In a time when digital consumption is up and the pressure is on for brands to deliver new and fresh content at an increasingly rapid pace, brands need to find efficiencies for content marketing efforts. Our advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are saving marketers time creating campaigns by removing the guesswork in finding similar images for them. With Sitecore AI Image Similarity, marketers simply select the first image and AI will use tags, colors, and descriptions to help you select the rest for campaigns and assets.
We’ve also enhanced Content Hub’s video support to include automated, AI-driven video annotations, time-range annotations, subtitles, and tags. You can also now cut your videos directly in Content Hub.
And we’ve made Content Hub more extensible with:
- A deeper integration between Sitecore DAM and Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator
- A new JavaScript SDK for more efficient integrations with third-party solutions
- MRM and CMP integrations that empower DAM users to manage both agile content workflows and timeline-based project management workflows
- A tight integration to CHILI publisher, which automates the production of brand-compliant, ready-to-use printed assets at scale
Sitecore Experience Commerce version 10
Just like Sitecore XP and XM, the latest version of Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) supports Sitecore Containers and all of their benefits in speed, agility, and simplicity of deployment. Developers will also be pleased to see new Scriban templates support and a sample integration to Sitecore DAM (Product/PCM).
But we didn’t forget merchandisers and marketers. We’ve included significant new features to help drive higher average order value and revenue:
- Advanced product bundling
- Promotion enhancements
- Product recommendations
- Product boosting
- Automated birthday campaign (also in XP)
Digital transformation for today — and tomorrow
Digital transformation is bigger than technology. It requires aligning teams, streamlining processes, and increasing insight. But your choice in technology can be what makes or breaks your success.
As we’re all scrambling to adjust to our new normal, it’s easy to focus only on the present and immediate future. This focus is essential. Some businesses won’t make it. Others will barely survive. Some will emerge stronger.
If there’s one thing I could say to anyone considering their digital transformation today, it’s this: Yes, you need to change, and fast. But any change you make, whether a minor tweak or a complete overhaul, should do more than respond to the current crisis. It should provide a firm foundation for the future. With two decades of success, Sitecore offers that firm foundation to thousands of businesses and organizations across the globe today. We’re prepared to support you — today and tomorrow.
Learn more about our latest product releases:
Learn more about digital transformation in our Insights.
And please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions. We’re more excited than ever to speak with you about digital transformation, and how we can support you during this trying time.
Written by Desta Price.
Posted: Tuesday 11 August 2020